Brand Name Beginnings – Dale’s Daily Data

It was back in 1964 when Leroy and Forrest Raffel opened up their first sandwich shop in Boardman, Ohio.  Their menu featured roast beef sandwiches, potato chips and Texas-size iced tea. It was the first of what was to be a chain of restaurants.  So how about a catchy name?  They decided on Arby’s.  Most people think it stands for the letters R.B. as in roast beef.  Nope – it stands for the initials of of the Raffel Brothers.

Marquis Converse fell down a flight of stairs in 1908 and he blamed it on his slippery, hard-soled shoes.
So it gave him an idea for shoes with rubber soles to keep people from slipping.  One year later he began
producing those shoes for men, women and children.  He called them Converse.

John Lea and William Perrins were a couple of English chemists hired by a rich land owner to try to duplicate a sauce he tasted in the Orient.  He had some of the ingredients, but not all of them and he didn’t know how much of each.  The two chemists tried but didn’t like the results, so they just stored away the bottles in a dark cellar.  A few years later they stumbled across the boxes of sauce and when they tasted it this time it was delicious.  The aging process had made all the difference.  We know it today as Lea and Perrins Worchestire sauce.